KEEGAN: Just finished recording with Ben Clarfield.
We discussed some of his influence from Ido Portal, special times with Charles, getting into a little bit around neurotyping, and how that fits together potentially for connective tissue training and long-term connective tissue adaptation.
Really interesting discussion and I think it will be the first of many.
Ben is a really experienced coach.
He's recently joined ATG for Coaches and you can see he worked quite a lot with Charles and went to a number of different educational events.
I actually did that John Broz weightlifting one as well and Biosignature a few times.
He's worked with some top-level athletes and obviously lots of other people through history.
So it was a really interesting conversation and I hope you enjoy it.
KEEGAN: All right, we've got Ben Clarfield here from Toronto Reach PT
BEN: Yeah, Reach Personal Training.
KEEGAN: Can you give us a little bit of background just about Reach?
BEN: Yeah, absolutely. My wife and I had the opportunity over a decade ago to get our own facility.
Training is an ego business but I actually wanted to facilitate a place that could take the client and the athlete first.
So our team. We have a team that we share clients.
There's usually a lead trainer on the sort of client or athlete but we are generally fair.
So the magic of that is that we can bear scheduling which means we can really address the client's time and have them come in more so we can do a better job of that instead of it being kind of like “well if I’m on holiday then the athlete or the client's on holiday too” but that's not the goals of the athlete or the client.
So that sort of has been really good, building a team.
I’m a big fan of teams. We've trained anyone from elite-level ballet dancers, one of the top in the world. She's of rehabber, she's unbelievable… to NFL players to collegiate basketball, hockey, all kinds of different athletes and general pop people that are obliterated in their legs and stuff.
I have my little guy popped his head in and yeah…
So we just really a place where people are there for serious training and I have to say sort of on the realm of what brought me to you guys is the legacy of Charles Poliquin.
So Charles was my mentor and also a friend, you know rest in peace and I would say this and there's a few of us around the world that I really wouldn't have anything and I did all the work, it's not like I didn't do the work and my team didn't work but without Charles, I wouldn't be where I am.
All this knowledge, all his help, I did countless consults with him, calls, he would call me when he was on the toilet or whatever, half-naked shirt off, cussing out someone or whatever and it's just he truly is…
My youngest I’ve named after him.
So yeah, it's I would say, Charles's legacy but there's other people too.
So Ido Portal and sort of all this different stuff, Olympic weightlifting and all these different coaches and trainers that are inspired me but really, fundamentally, I’m with you in the sense of I think movement is key.
So I would say that we're a place that does that.
It's not a cookie cutter, everything's tailor-made but again we're continually open to learning more.
So I think it's amazing what you've done and it's fantastic what Ben's done and the legacy of Charles lives on and it's kind of amazing to see that and being a part of that is really cool.
I love talking strength and conditioning, talking movement but I think it's fundamentally connected to the individual celestial psychology of both approach and the athlete and I think that's kind of cool seeing what you do and what you've done and what Ben's doing and anyway it's cool to be a part of it.
Thank you.
KEEGAN: Awesome intro and I appreciate you making some time for us today you definitely… we've got a lot of crossover with influencers and things that we've been interested in and parts that we've gone down yeah it'd be cool to hear more about like when did you get into the Poliquin work and did you go through like t nation articles and whatnot before yeah yeah
Yeah, it'd be cool to hear more about when did you get into the Poliquin work and did you go through t-nation articles and whatnot before?
BEN: Yeah, I was very lucky.
I have to give credit to a guy who's done this for a long time but he's more into bodybuilding and it's funny that you posted about Vince Gironda, he trained with Vince Gironda and he was a Charles guy, this guy Mike Demeter who was a he was a long time guy.
He was a former biker and I started training at a really crappy good life which is the sort of anytime fitness or life fitness in Toronto and I looked at him and he was coming in at 5 a.m and he was done by noon with clients that were… he was great and very successful and I looked at him and said “what the hell are you doing man” and he's like “listen son” pretty much, this is over a decade ago probably almost 14 years ago, 13, 14, 15 years ago.
So he said “Listen, read every single article by Charles Poliquin on t-nation, that's your education, go and do the programs upstairs and then do it with your clients and you'll get great results”.
I had just gotten married and I had no money and I told my wife that I just started the job and I said to her “I gotta do this PSP1 course and she's like you don't have any money”.
“Yeah, I’ll put it on the credit card.”
It's like “you're an idiot” and then it was the best decision I’ve ever made and I did that and then I got successful with all the stuff and then did level two and then Biosignature and multiple internships with Charles and Charles came to my gym and every time he was in Toronto we would train at my gym, go for breakfast and coffee and lunch and we became very good friends and literally, he would call me.
I’m not saying I was his best friend but I spoke to him two days before he passed and I still have all the messages of the crazy… he would send me and he was a very generous guy and I think the thing with Charles is that the people… the greater the crowd, the more bombastic he was.
So he would say the bombastic thing to get the point across but if you were sitting with him on lunch, he was extremely nuanced and subtle and most of his answers would have been something along the lines of “it depends” which I actually think is brilliant.
So he had the ability to boil down a point and make people go… so someone would ask “hey what about a vegan diet or a vegetarian?”, he says “absolutely, a vegan diet is absolutely fantastic as long as you have two kilos of meat a day”.
So things like that which is super bombastic and whatever, all this kind of stuff and you said it recently that more excuses than the pregnant nun kind of stuff, he was so good at that kind of stuff but it was rhetorical, it was to get his point across and then when you started digging down into the nitty-gritty, it was a significant quantity of “it depends” or “yes I agree with Louis” or “I agree with Charlie Francis or Gerondo on this”.
And I think you said it great but Charles Poliquin is the greatest bodybuilding coach for performance, for athletic performance and I think the genius of the flip side, I’ve said the opposite often, is that he's the best athletic performance person for bodybuilding and body composition.
I remember being in an internship in Sweden with him, it was a hypertrophy camp.
Funnily enough… that was an interesting whole shebang, not my cup of tea but he was a super nice guy and that's why I gravitate to you because it's the athletic truth group as opposed to the bodybuilding but that again like we can't hit on Arnold because he brought all of us are getting paid because of Arnold.
And then Charles but I think the fascinating thing was he had a significant quantity of approaches that six percent body fat, women at eight percent body fat, phenomenal faith and can pump out volume and we're relatively strong because Charles made people strong but they couldn't jump and to me, it was phenomenal and coming from basketball and athletic performance, I could jump, not like Ben but when I was 19 I could dunk, not anymore but hey I'd like to get it back at 40.
KEEGAN: How old are you?
BEN: I’m 40. I’m turning 41.
So I'd like to be able to dunk again but I think it's cool, I’ll do it but I think it was really interesting seeing people in phenomenal trade but that couldn't do the athletic stuff.
So he said “Listen, if you're going to get any athletes, you have to demonstrate this” and it was a cool thing to see, guys that were really into body comp and he forced them to do athletic stuff.
So I think that gets back to the idea of Charles in movement and this kind of stuff and some of the stuff I was sort of I don't know if you knew or not but there was a lot of stuff that Charles would do… Jefferson curls but it wasn't the same strategic what it was strategic but it wasn't in the same way as the way Ben is doing and the way you guys are doing it.
So there was flexibility but I agree with you, he did say he wished he devoted himself more to that but there was that there in the sense that for some athletes and different programs you would say “Okay you're gonna do this exercise” and people would look and be like “What?” and it'd be like a Jefferson curl or rounded back good morning and people were like “What? why are we doing that? That's crazy” but he would do that.
But it wasn't as systematic as you guys are talking about.
KEEGAN: I think the big one is the sissy squat which I think Geronda was a fan of the sissy squat, right?
BEN: Yeah.
KEEGAN: I wonder why that didn't make it into Charles's vocabulary, he had the machine that doesn’t stretch the quad…
BEN: I think in some ways he got… I would make fun of him… he would get a new toy and I would make fun of him and I would say “Hi my name is Charles Poliquin, I am a toy-aholic, I bought another Atlantis toy… I have a problem, it's been three months since my last purchase of a toy” and he would laugh because it's true.
Because he would get stuff sent to him and he'd like playing with that and he enjoyed the bodybuilding… I think there's a significant quantity of us that are Charles guys, that are bodybuilding, that's just stupid and there's a significant quantity of body comp guys that are athletic performance.
Yeah, I don't care, give me 6, 12, 25, I want to get shredded and his genius was he was absolutely into and sympathetic to the bodybuilding world whereas I’m on this style of like “Well, if you can move better, I don't care how I look” but he's like “No, you need to care how you look because it's connected to the performance” and to the other ones it's “No, you need to care how you move because it's connected to how you look”.
So he was a genius in that aspect, I think.
But the toy stuff, he was always into toys.
So I think in some ways when you're forced to not use toys you come up with that, I mean this is the brilliance of Ido Portal, we've talked a little bit and I got into Ido Portal because of Charles so it really gave credit to Charles.
So it's kind of an interesting amalgam and but I think that's an interesting thing to talk to you about your programming and how we're talking about this a little…
The differentiation between tendon and ligament training in some ways is, I was thinking about this, is it's difficult to stick to programs that are tendon and ligament training because they take more time and if you're neurologically made up to be bored by…
If you want to call it neurotype or whatever Charles calls it, different people have different conceptions of it.
It's harder to stick to stuff and I found that a difficult thing with me when probably my tendons, and ligaments need stuff because it's connected to… if it takes much longer…
Ido Portals programming is like this. I’m not divulging anything but if you're going to be good connective tissue you have to love doing stuff for longer and obviously if you're a basketball player, like a joke, one of my NFL players said “Well, yeah, he never wanted to play basketball, one, because he was 6’4 and that wasn't tall enough and two, he was 280 pounds and that's way too big.
So he just likes hitting people and the other thing is if you're a basketball player you gotta love shooting jump shots, he's like “I just want to dunk on people, I don't want to shoot jumps all day”.
So to get significant, obviously, a significant athlete that played on the Atlanta Falcons, and the Dolphins, he's a professional NFLer, absolute freak, dunking wasn't hard at 280 pounds, he could fly and smack the bit out of people but he's like “Basketball, I don't like shooting jump shots”.
You have to love shooting hundreds of thousands of jump shots a day.
I play basketball but not at Ben's…
But the point is you have to love shooting jump shots.
So in some ways, if you love doing the same bit again and again and then again in some ways it seems to be conducive to tendon ligament stuff.
Whereas if you like that pop of hitting hard, give me neurological one to five reps, explode, like you like to Olympic lifting, I like that too, like give me one rep, give me two reps but the thing is that as Charles says with this fire type stuff, “You gotta change the stuff”.
So in some ways, I think it's finding a hard balance like how do you force yourself to do the fit that you need to do even though your neurological type doesn't love it and that's something I’ve had trouble, it's like “okay do the couch stretch again” and I’m like “Fine”.
KEEGAN: I’ve actually personally, I’m not a couch stretcher.
I could never make myself do it, I’ve done it about three times in my life but I have come up like basically the single-leg human knee extension, if you just put yourself in that bottom position, I find that more palatable, it's stronger and I can kind of chill out there where I just don't make myself couch stretch.
But anyway, I think what we get into Ben is a really important conversation, one part of this is periodization and neurotyping, and that side of things, personality, where does that come into programming?
Which I think is a really important conversation.
The other thing is like could we periodize connective tissue development and how would you program that and no one's ever tried to answer that question publicly, to my knowledge.
I just think there probably are quite a few different methods, there probably are ways to look at that that would work for people who aren't necessarily going to jump on 12-week cycles because a lot of athletes aren't going to be on 12-week cycles just by the nature of their sport and their games and their travel and their pre-seasons and whatnot.
So there's no choice but to play with the ATG Online formula which is great for what it's made for but a pro athlete is going to do it differently just because they have their other schedule to plug in on top of that.
But yeah, I think this is really important stuff that's why these conversations need to happen, that's why this community needs to exist and this is going to evolve and that's what's exciting to me.
BEN: Yeah, I think that's an interesting thing.
So I was thinking about from a “fire type” whatever your dopamine, whatever you want to call it as I’m that and I’m in a significant quantity of explosive athletes are that, thinking about how you would do it in two to three-week blocks but it's all about cheating.
In some ways, it's like we're doing the same thing again and again and again until we get good.
So split squats three times a week, man, you're going to get good at split squats.
Also, squat every day, also that's the genius of German volume training for squatting, which you've talked about Wolfgang.
Wolfgang Unsold uses 10 sets of 10 back squats because guess what, you're going to do 100 squats at the beginner rather than three sets of ten…
It's not gonna be necessarily at sixty percent or seventy percent of RM but you're gonna re-gear that.
So you use the continuation of doing the thing again and again and again and you get good at it but I think in some ways tricking the brain to feel like it's different and Charles talked about the ripping case
So if we did five sets of five flip flops, I’ve used this with athletes, Monday is dumbbells, foot squats, six reps.
Wednesday is barbell five reps. Friday is low pulley.
These are ways of tricking the thing.
KEEGAN: Yeah, I think when you bring it into an in-person environment or working with someone one-to-one then as an experienced coach like those nuances, there's no challenge with bringing that variety in and I’m really confident that you're gonna get similar if not slightly better results from that increase in variation with the caveat of, if you keep playing with all the variables all the time then you probably won't stick to that goal of having more than body weight split squat and then ultimately you're not going to get to the place you want.
So the simplicity definitely has its benefit and then I think just those slight changes, even just tempos, just going slow on the way down, pausing in the bottom, pausing in the middle.
I love those variations and I think that all definitely does… you have its place.
I like the idea of the first year just practice these movements over and over again.
I think that the genius of ATG online is really in that simplicity where it's just so brutally simple that you'll either do it and you get crazy good results and you jump again and you feel great or you don't do it and not going to be testing, you're not going to be challenging your connective tissues to the same degree like it's deliberately smooth and safe.
Some of the adjustments that we've made for example the execution of the Nordic, we've made it less explosive out of the bottom.
How long have you kind of been tuning in to Ben’s work and ATG?
BEN: I'd say probably a month and a month and a bit. But I’ve watched pretty much everything.
So I’m new to it in that sense.
KEEGAN: It's quite different, there were quite a few different nuances within the movements and we were blowing up a few hamstring tendons and I actually experienced that myself, and I was sort of jumping in with what Ben was doing because I could see that he cracked this code with the knees but then it turned out he didn't have exactly the same dexterity of thinking with other parts of the body because the knees is where he really had his trouble so he solved that better than I’ve seen anyone solve…
BEN: It makes sense to me.
I think the things that make sense to me that he's doing that I haven't seen even with Charles and I’m giving credit where credit is due, is sort of the obsessive nature of rep repetition at what you sort of talked about at a two, three out of five.
And there's genius in that and if you're a dopamine fire guy you're like “This shit's boring, give me a five” and there's genius in that in the sense that you can continue to hit connective tissue at a two, three.
I think you articulated that well.
I think that's the articulation of what he's doing and the point is, how do you trick a dopamine guy to do that at a 2,3, that's going to allow him to do the fives when he wants to do the fives?
And that's I think the brilliance and I think that's the nuance that we're discussing which is…
How long do I stay on the first program and jump to dense and I’m debating in my head?
KEEGAN: Yeah, you know one of the guys was talking about that he does, I think he's saying, he does two or three weeks of zero and then does two or three weeks of dense and he's going back in between them, accumulation intensification.
For him, that's accumulation intensification relatively because there's weight in dense.
Then that will get to a point where dense is more of an accumulation program and standards might be his intensification.
As a coach, for me, the genius like Ben says, when we've had these conversations but we've sort of… Ben's basically said “The programming, I don't care, just choose the right movements and keep getting better at those movements” and it's like executing a back somersault.
If you make your back somersault more and more snappy then that's it, that's the thing.
I think for you, it's about if we have that leaderboard there, I think that's what's going to make the difference for you of like “Okay, I’m going to progress through this stuff and I’m going to get back to sprinting and I’m going to get back to dunking” and you're going to put yourself in the position where you can do that stuff and I think that is what's going to light up the dopamine types and the competitive types, which a lot of the guys who join the community are like.
And the carrot for the athlete is “Look, this is 20, 30 minutes and then you get to go feel amazing.
You get to go dunk, you get to go sprint, you feel bulletproof, and you feel like you can run through a wall rather than trying to make the weight training the reward.
Whereas us coaches, we get stuck on this thing of the weight training being the reward, and then we can't even go and play that tennis or do that jumping session or sprint or whatever because we've been doing all this for zero x zero training and then it's just not there anymore.
BEN: That makes a lot of sense, I think the thing that sort of rekindled because there's new, I’m not saying there isn't new… but in some ways, it's sort of the fire of Charles, I see it in different people which is amazing to me but I think what's fascinating with what Ben did, what really kicked it into me is his absolute obsessive love of the split squat and I used to have this line to all of the coaches that work with me, “If you ever get bored of teaching people the split squat, quit training”
So I’ve said that to my coaches and this is something I’ve said for a decade plus so to me seeing Ben be like split squat… but the other thing I remember in some ways, the thing with Charles is he's like, I remember this, he said, “Everyone should be three sets of eight perfect split squats on the floor with the barbell on your back before you squat” and everyone's like “Yeah, cool story Charles, I’m gonna squat”.
So this is back to where Charles said it all and Ben's like “No, remember that thing that Charles said… three sets of eight, perfect barbell back squat, barbell split squat, foot on the floor, perfect.
Ass touching your heel, back leg straight then you deserve to squat but then you're doing a training camp and people can barely split squat but it's like “All right, 10x with hooks. Let's go” because it's a week of… and then you're like “Well, I’m going to do what I did in hypertrophy camp”.
So Charles sort of lets you address your own issues, he says like “If you haven't done that stuff, it sucks for you, you suck. Address it on your own if not you're gonna eat it”.
So I’ve seen Ben be like “Listen, everyone should be in the position where they can get to rear foot elevates for the back…” but that's gonna take a year for some people or maybe two, that's okay but you shouldn't say “Oh well, I’m never gonna get…”
No, if you're gonna take ownership, extreme ownership of your body, you should get there.
That should be something that you should get to and if not, you suck.
It's the same thing in chin-ups, if you can't do chin-ups as a human, you suck.
That doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just means your body sucks.
So if you can't do 12 chin-ups perfectly, that was Charles's point, these are standards and in some ways, that's what Charles held up.
The Homer Simpson line, it's like just because everyone… that's normal. Homer Simpson is normal, who cares?
So let's set a standard for what the human body can achieve at your level, you and I maybe are never playing in the NFL, sorry.
Those dudes, that's a whole other ball game.
Maybe Ben, maybe now he could play in the NBA, different ball game but it is what it is.
But understanding that aspect but saying “Okay, I'm gonna take me and do the best I can” but saying “Okay, there's a standard, let's get to that”.
But obviously, it'll take work and so the magic is the discussion of the connective tissue because that's where it is but that's the thing, to me, the conversation is like “How do I trick myself into doing the… that's good for me” and I think in some ways, there's some people that have done the same program for 10 years and then they come to you.
“How did you do the same thing for 10 years and not trick yourself” but there's the people that are like “I change every week” and you're like “Well, how did you get any progress if you change every week” unless you're a freak neurologically but yeah, I think that's a fascinating thing to see.
Ben's obsessive, the split squat, get it, make it.
Obviously with other stuff but make the split squat perfect and that was Charles, I mean, he said it but he didn't show it the way Ben is showing it.
So I think in some ways… and then having the articulation of the discussion of connective tissue, that to me is what's very cool about what Ben’s doing.
Obviously, you're facilitating that.
KEEGAN: Why do you think Charles said that in terms of the split squat?
I know it was there in my PICP1, I had Derek Woodske present that, he already had a 40-inch vertical jump before he went to Charles…
BEN: But he was under Judd, he had Judd teaching him so it's not like Judd's a Charles guy, Charles took Judd to the Olympics.
KEEGAN: Derek was very strong, very neurological, I’m not sure he saw the need for… the way I saw the Peterson step up and the split squat was like “This is stuff you can do, now let's go squat” like that's my recollection of it and it's probably like I’ll be a young coach and just want to…
But it didn't strike me at all, where Ben it's like “No, that's the program.” If you squat and whatever… but the program is get Petersons, get good at split squats, how do you justify or what did you see from Charles around like, Why is that split squat so important? Why should someone go so far with it or at least get to three sets of eight?
BEN: He just said, I mean it was in his mind as range of motion is king.
He said the rep is king and the rep is always king but I think the thing that I’ve talked with some of the coaches and there's a lot of garbage out there, it's how do you coach… that's what's cool about seeing what Ben's doing and what you're doing and what we do and what some of my friends… Preston Green is a very good friend of mine in Florida and he does unbelievable stuff with these guys that are freaks and my very good friend Dave Lawrence and my friend… does hockey players and NFLers and we've all talked about this where there's not many guys that are obsessed with the rep.
It's not just the quantity of reps but it's the quality of the round and that's the magic of Charles.
So if he's coaching you and you've had him coach you, it's okay.
Well if that's what's caught as garbage, we're going to make it better.
Now, he gives you the tools to do that, and then what you have to do is you have to move on and say “Okay, well, I’m going to get it to flat on the floor with half body weight, full body weight.
So that's the thing that Charles said is that he gave you the tools and he said it and then you're sort of like off on your own, explore.
So he also gave so much.
So you could become obsessed with 6-12-25 and watch someone do garbage split squats and they're like “Yeah 6-12-25” because they would become… it's testosterone or German body comp, yeah but you're not doing the squat properly.
So you need remedial work, you need your split squats, and you need a structural balance phase.
So you always talked about structural balance. So that was always there.
So it's not like that wasn't there in that end it was more along the lines of he gave you the tools and then you could either take it like Ben's taking it and push it.
I mean he always said stuff like “Get lean before you put muscle on” because then people would forget that and you're kind of like “Well, life” and blah blah blah and all this stuff, and then people wouldn't get lean and they would do 10 sets of one and get strong but…
So he said a ton of stuff that you could take but people wouldn't do…
So he did say that about the split squat and Ben took that to magical effect but he's also taking hamstring work and I think in some ways, it's an interesting thing because I have a few pieces of Atlantis magical leg curl stuff which is a conversation but if you're doing stuff like Ben saying “Look, you don't need equipment”, you don’t need equipment but some equipment's really good like, I have a tibialis machine, it's really good from Atlantis.
I’m talking about that it's great but you can do it without it.
So in some ways, my gym is pretty expensive, I’ve got Charles's Watson dumbbells.
I have the ones that say “Strengthen them”, from him it's kind of an amazing thing and Ben just got his.
So you don't need all of the tools but they're pretty awesome.
So I think that's the thing is people get obsessed with the tools and forget the movement but sometimes you can get into the position where you sort of forget that tools are good too and I think that's what Charles… he had so much, he gave so much.
People get obsessed with the Watson dumbbells but then not do the bench curls properly with the dumbbell.
Fundamentally, you still have to remember their tools but they're really cool tools.
So I really like what Ben's doing about the person that had a really nice…
KEEGAN: He had a really nice gym. I think he just wants that 12-year-old kid to be able to… his 12-year-old self was buying all these dunk programs and getting messed up and he wanted to have that solution out there but he's definitely not against and when we're going to be… we're working on an ATG gym format of if your budget's here, then this is what gear you have and if your budget's here then this is what gear you have and…
Yeah, all right.
We better wrap this up because we can talk forever.
I appreciate your time Ben and yeah I’m looking forward to covering more, thank you, brother.
BEN: Thank you very much. Chat again soon.
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